Reformation Sunday

Matthew 22:34-40

A sermon given by Pastor Elaine Hewes

Redeemer Lutheran Church Bangor, Maine

October 26, 2014

Ever since I can remember, I have had serious questions about

God. Which is surprising perhaps, given the family in which I grew up; a

family that never missed worship on Sunday mornings, including the

Sundays we were on vacation, when my parents would find the local

Lutheran Church in the town closest to the Northern Wisconsin resort

where we were staying on any given year… And then after worship

make my sister and me ask the pastor to sign the bulletin so we could

bring it back to the Sunday School superintendent in our home

congregation, who would then give us the credit we needed in order to

make sure that at the end of the year we would get the next bar added

to our perfect attendance Sunday School pin. (I had ten all together

when I left for college).

Mine was the kind of family that said grace before every meal,

and prayers before bedtime. My mother called my sister and me into

the living room every morning before school for devotions, which

always included a reading from the daily devotional “Christ in our

Home” and a poem from “Ideals” magazine with its accompanying

photograph of a beautifully tended flower garden, or a snow-capped

mountain a-blaze with morning light, or a perfectly manicured little girl

with tight braids and a plaid dress sitting next to a cocker spaniel puppy

with dark brown eyes and a red ribbon for a collar.

And just to make sure I didn’t veer too far off the “Godly” track

during the school day, my mother always put a note in my lunch bag

with an inspirational saying of some kind, like the one from Dwight

Moody that said, “I know the Bible is inspired because it inspires me.”

(Not that there’s anything wrong with such a saying. But when you’re

in fourth grade, and you’re sitting in the lunch room with your

classmates, it’s not necessarily what you want to find nestled between

your peanut-butter sandwich and your banana.)

Given that I had such a thorough immersion in “all things

religious” over the course of my growing up years, you’d think perhaps I

would have felt comfortable with the whole “God thing”… that I would

have had little room for questions in the midst of so many answers, so

many inspirational sayings and devotional readings and theologically

astute sermons…

But I had many questions. And one in particular, which I

remember puzzling over for a very long time… The question that must

have arisen for me in light of the very Gospel text we just heard from

Matthew… The text in which Jesus answered the lawyer’s question

about which commandment was the greatest by saying, “This one… You

shall the love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your

soul and with all your mind…. This is the greatest and first

commandment… And secondly, you shall love your neighbor as

yourself.” The first part of Jesus’ response raising for me the very

persistent and troublesome question of how I could ever bring myself

to love God… How I could ever make myself love God when God was

associated for me with the song we sang during Sunday School opening

exercises,

“Be careful little hand what you do (2X),

For the Father up above

is looking down with love,

So be careful little hands what you do.”

Associated as well with my 3rd grade Sunday School teacher’s

insistence that we use well-sharpened #2 pencils to write the “correct”

answers in our Sunday School workbooks, which by the way had to be

opened perfectly flat on the table….

Associated too with that girl with the tight braids and the plaid

dress in the “Ideals” magazine who looked like she followed every rule

in the book just perfectly, never objecting to going to church on

vacation Sundays in northern Wisconsin when she could have been

floating on a raft in the lake or fishing from the pier like the rest of the

kids at Peterson’s Lakeside Resort.

Not to mention the God who was up in the clouds somewhere

keeping track of the questionable things my hands were doing despite

the fact that He had sacrificed his only begotten son so that I might

receive salvation through no merit of my own, and if I believed that I

could go to heaven when I died…

This was not a God I could ever imagine loving. I knew this from a

very early age. And while there were other voices in my “faith

formation” as a child; pastors’ voices and choir directors’ voices that

tried to open up for me images of God that were not tied to correct

answers in a workbook, perfect attendance at Sunday School, tidy

braids, and a horrible sacrifice exacted for the things my hands did…

While there were other voices offering other possibilities for seeing and

knowing God, I could not see past the ones that looked like a wagging

finger and a carefully creased work-book with a finely sharpened #2

pencil lying alongside…

Not until much later in life that is, when I started teaching first

graders to read. Because it was then that I first began to realize that

the “idea” of God, the words and Sunday School lessons and sermons

and theological insights and church teachings “about” God that I had

been given over the course of so many years… even the word “God”

itself, just like the letters of the alphabet, lived in service to something

else…

So here’s the thing about teaching first graders to read, (which I

did for many years before becoming a pastor)….

There are of course the letters M-O-O-S-E, which go together to

make the word “moose.” There’s the necessity of learning how to

recognize these letters; the necessity of learning how to make their

beautiful sounds, how to put the letters together to make the word,

how to write them on the lined paper with a big black pencil…

But then there’s the afternoon in late Fall when a moose comes

close to the window of the Sedgwick School library, and news of his

arrival travels down the hall from the kindergarten room to the 8th

grade room… and before you know it, every kid and teacher and staff

person, from the principal to the lunch room lady is in the library, all

120 of us…

And the big kids let the little kids get closest to the window, and

everyone gets absolutely quiet… and there is this moment as the

moose stands not far from us and lifts his majestic head, as if sniffing

the air for some scent of wildness to lead him home; there is this

moment when the letters M-O-O-S-E can’t begin to hold everything

that the moose is, and the moose itself can’t begin to hold everything

that the moment is, and the moment itself can’t begin to hold the thing

that has no name but moves among us all the same… The thing we all

go back to our classrooms to try to write about using letters and words,

but never in a way that can say it all….

Or there are the letters “S-N-O-W” for snow. Beautiful letters,

yes, but without a hope of containing what happens when the first

snow of the season falls, and all the first graders and their teacher go

out to catch the flakes on their tongues and to walk on the ancient

woods road out behind the school, where some of the children’s

grandfathers in years past cut wood for the winter, and where now

there is a layer of white covering everything, and some of the kids lay

down hoping to make the first snow angel of the season, their little

faces looking up into the darkening grey sky alive with whitely whirring

flakes, no two of them alike…

And the teacher, knowing the word “S-N-O-W” can’t hold all there

is to say about it, gathers the first graders into the reading corner after

they’ve come in and hung their snowsuits on the hooks in the hallway,

and she reads Gwendolyn Brook’s poem “Cynthia in the Snow,” which

goes like this…

(You can find the poem at

http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AfAm/afampoetry/Brook

sCynthiaInSnow.htm)

And the teacher hopes to high heaven that somehow the mystery

of what the poem and the day have to say about snow will not only

help the children learn about letters and sounds and how to use them

and write them and read them, but will also help the children go

beyond them to the thing the letters and the words cannot begin to

hold… Something the letters and words live in service to… Something,

perhaps, so beautiful it hurts…

So what I came to see when teaching first graders to read is how

easy it is to get so caught up in the letters and the words and the

correct formation of the letters on the line that you forget that these

things are not an end unto themselves, but entrances into whole new

worlds… What I came to see is how easy it is to get so caught up in the

phonetic rules and the decoding skills and the correct answer in the

comprehension workbook, that children can totally miss the possibility

of loving reading for the sake of loving (with all their hearts and souls

and minds) the thing to which the words and letters point…

What I came to realize when teaching first graders to read is that

this is what often happens in the Church as well…. Caught up, as it can

sometimes get (so completely) in “correct answers,” wagging fingers,

un-evocative old language and limp, lifeless theology.

Thank heaven then that there are those who invite us to the

Church’s equivalent of the window in the Sedgwick School library

where the moose lifts his magnificent head and sniffs the scent of

wildness, and we are undone, speechless for the wonder of it all… and

commissioned none-the-less to try to say what it is we have seen …

Just as Martin Luther and all the other Reformers of the 16th

century did as they challenged the Church of their day, caught as it was

so completely in the “mastery” of “works righteousness” (a “program”

of “holy” living designed to insure that you’d go to heaven when you

died)…. The Church of the day, caught so completely in that program of

mastery, it could not begin to offer a glimpse of the mystery in its

midst… (namely that “salvation” at its root means “room to move

again”…. a gift of love and grace as close to us as the air we breathe… a

gift of love and grace given without requirements or conditions… a gift

of love and grace that descends even into the depths of our deepest

despair and loss and fear and death with arms open in love to receive it

all…. + )

Thank heaven for the reformers whose work and passion we

celebrate today on Reformation Sunday, calling us to wonder again

how we, as the church of Jesus in our day, can speak a word that opens

up for ourselves and others something that has more to do with

mystery than with mastery…

Something that actually allows us to move again from the places

in our lives where we are bound by fear and failure and guilt and

shame… bound by apathy and narrow vision and isolation and

depression and gut-wrenching weariness…

Something we might actually come to love with our hearts and

souls and minds in such a way that it opens us to love our neighbors as

ourselves…

Something, as Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor says, ‘that

does not require us to choose between the Sermon on the Mount and

the magnolia tree’… But invites us to see in the very gifts of our faith; in

the very gifts of Scripture, of sacrament, creed, Sunday School lessons

and 3rd grade Sunday School teacher, the mystery toward which these

gifts can only point, and then, to bear witness to what we have seen…

The Mystery that if it could sing, might sing something like this…

God’s strong word of love is bright

Shining in the dark of night,

Blazing with the fire of grace

Op’ning every closed-up place,

Rising from the buried grain

So that love might live again.

Or, on a more humorous note, like this…. especially if you, like

me, are a lovely Lutheran Lady, or if you have such a Lutheran Lady in

your family circle…. (Sung to the tune of the beloved Lutheran hymn,

“Children of the Heavenly Father.”)

Oh my lovely Lutheran ladies,

Drinking coffee strong and good,

Baking cookies by the hour,

Doing everything you “should.”

Yah’ I know you’re always pleasant,

Yah’ I know your manner’s mild,

Thinking grace is yours through hot dish,

Tuna noodle with a smile.

But my lovely Lutheran ladies,

Yah ya’ bettcha God loves you

Even though your leutfisk dinners

Taste a lot like Elmer’s Glue.

For the love of God is wider

Than the boundaries of the sea.

Offta, offta, alleluia,

Lutheran ladies, by grace you’re free.

Or like this… the song the Hallowell Hospice singers sing to their

patients in their last hours…. The song one pastor I know sings to

children at their baptisms, saying he’s singing it on behalf of God…

(It’s called How could anyone, and you can find the words at

http://www.libbyroderick.com/Lyrics%20to%20HCA%20CD.htm )

Wouldn’t it be something if this song was sung for Sunday School

openings instead of “Be Careful Little Hands What You Do”?

Wouldn’t it be something to hear this song sung at baptisms?

Wouldn’t it help us to see that the word “baptism” can’t begin to hold

everything that baptism is, and that the water of baptism can’t begin to

hold everything that the moment is, and that the moment itself can’t

begin to hold the thing that has no name but moves among us all the

same… The thing so deeply connected to our soul… The thing we all go

back to our classrooms to try to write about using letters and words,

but never in a way that can say it all….

This morning we are going to sing this song as we baptize Samuel

James Harris… The whole congregation is going to sing this song as little

Sam and his parents and sponsors gather around the baptismal font…

And the words of the song have already been included in Sam’s “ABC’s

of Baptism Book” (on the “M” page for the word “Mystery”) so Sam

grows up knowing that the waters of baptism point beyond themselves

to that place where he looks through the window and see what cannot

be contained…

That he, beautiful beloved Sam, is deeply connected to a mystery

that is pure grace and pure love… A mystery of pure grace and pure

love, impossible to contain, and yet made known in a thousand million

ways from moose to magnolias, from first snow to a moment in the

Sedgwick School Library when 120 children fall utterly silent for the

sight of something so beautiful it hurts…

A mystery of pure grace and pure love that little Sam can trust to

be with him even when everything in his life is falling apart… even when

fear and failure threaten to undo him… even when hordes of devils fill

the land… even when he despairs for what his hands have done… A

mystery of pure grace and pure love he can trust to surround him and

hold him because in the oddest and most scandalous of ways the

mystery that cannot be contained has chosen accompanying, suffering

love in which to be most powerfully and profoundly contained… to be

the clearest and truest expression of its presence and essence and

meaning….

Accompanying suffering love, made known in the person of

Jesus… who becomes for us a kind of Sedgwick School library window…

The place where we are all silenced in that moment when the moment

itself can’t begin to hold the all there is to hold… The place where, in

the throes of such devastating beauty we look around and see not only

the rest of the kids in the school… not only the principal and the

teachers and the lunch room lady… but also the girl from the Ideals

magazine with the tight braids and the plaid dress, the kids at

Peterson’s Lakeside resort who get to go fishing off the pier on Sunday

mornings instead of going to the Lutheran church in town, the mother

calling her daughters into the living room for morning devotions, Mr.

Bloomquist, the third grade Sunday School teacher with a bunch of

workbooks and #2 pencils in his hand, the Sunday School

superintendent who passes out the bars for yet another year of perfect

attendance… And you and me…. And little Sam and his family… and the

children making angels in the snow… and my neighbor, the one I am

not really all that fond of, and the moose and the magnolia tree… all of

the world that God so loves…

All of us standing there looking through the window that is

Jesus…. Glimpsing the love that holds it all…. Holds us all… And with all

of our hearts and souls and minds falling madly in love with what we

see…